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Will Richmond, president of Broadband Directions

Third in a series.

Everyone has something to say about Apple, especially about the prospects for what could be its next big thing: a television.

In a recent magazine story, I laid out the prospects for what some people are calling the iTV, as well as the considerable challenges Apple faces in bringing it to market. I couldn't include all the insights I got from smart people in tech and media, so in a series of posts, I'm sharing some of their thoughts to shed a little more light on what Apple can and can't do in television.

* There's no way cable companies will give up control of the user experience to Apple. "You have to look no further than the music industry to see what happens when the camel gets its nose under the tent," Richmond says. "Long-term, it would be allowing Apple to disintermediate them."

* If a pay TV operator decided to let Apple slap a new TV interface atop subscribers' channel lineup on an Apple settop box, it would further expose to viewers how much they're paying for channels they don't watch. Non-sports fans are subsidizing sports fans with their ever-rising cable bills because ESPN and other sports content is so expensive to cable operators. "That's the dirty little secret in the pay TV business," Richmond notes. And making it more obvious will only cause more viewers to demand a la carte subscriptions, threatening the bundle of channels that keeps studios and cable operators making billions.

* Pay TV companies are strong financial shape, unlike the music business was, so it has no reason to change the status quo. "The TV industry has no real incentive to reach out for a white knight like Apple," Richmond says.

Richmond says he is fully aware that the only big opportunity for Apple now is devices with screens bigger than the 27-inch max it has now. (Though we talked before the latest rumors of an Apple iWatch, so there's one more opportunity for an even smaller device.) So he thinks that Apple will eventually feel the need to offer a product for the living room, and that means it will be a TV of some sort.

Richmond does see two possible openings for Apple. For one, Dish Network or DirecTV might do a deal with Apple to offer consumers who normally default to their local cable company another reason to give them a try. "One of them could slip off the reservation," Richmond says.

The other potential crack in the cable armor: Apple could put a broadcast tuner inside an Apple TV, of course, while offering a way for broadcast network shows to be recorded in iCloud, like a DVR in the sky. Aereo, the company looking to skirt broadcast limitations by offering live TV over the Internet, may provide Apple with a conceptual starting point, Richmond says.

But Richmond thinks neither will happen soon. So for now, he says, "Apple is chipping around the edges. It may be that that's enough for today. They don't swing for the fences like Google. They move when they feel the stars and the moon align."

Next: Challenges from cable companies aside, Apple must make a settop box, and it will be far more important than the actual TV set, says Jeremy Allaire, chairman of the online video services provider Brightcove.